Two days ago, 800 people assembled at a south London art college for Silicon Valley Comes To Tech City, an event which saw experienced entrepreneurs and investors from America’s tech mecca engage in an afternoon of fast-paced panels and interview sessions with the aim of inspiring the UK’s next generation of startup founders.

The event is part of a wider initiative, Silicon Valley Comes To The UK, organized by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Sherry Coutu. Once a year, speakers from Silicon Valley areinvited to the UK to [ Continue Reading… ]

Nobody likes to fail, do they? But failure is a key facet of the entrepreneurial process. Richard Branson has succeeded with music, telecommunications, travel and even carbonated cola drinks – he’s probably one of the most well-known entrepreneurs in the world. But he too has failed – before he launched Virgin Records as a youth, he’d started a bird-breeding enterprise and also a Christmas-tree growing business, neither of which flourished.

Whilst Branson’s estimated current net worth of £3bn certainly softens the blow of any minor failures early in his career, it’s worth looking at how failure can be a good thing, as long as it’s managed correctly. It’s the act of trial and error that leads many entrepreneurs to success – so, if someone fails, at the very least it means they are trying. Failure only becomes a bad thing if they don’t learn from the experience.

At The Next Web, we mingle with a lot of startups and entrepreneurs, and we often hear about ‘pivots’ – where an initial seed of an idea evolves over time, as the startup better understands what’s needed by the public.

In an interview with serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis a few weeks back, we asked him if there was any way of cutting out the ‘pivoting’ part of a startup’s evolution, and Jason said:

“The best practice today is to get a product in the market and learn. You can’t do it any other way in my mind, at least not for Internet companies.”

Android posted a series of infographics on Thursday with impressive app stats to celebrate its 10 billionth downloadfrom the Android Market.

Android users from 190 countries download apps every day, according to one of the infographics. The U.S. is not the most app crazed country either — it ranked fourth behind South Korea (no. 1), Hong Kong (no. 2) and Taiwan (no. 3). Rounding out the top ten includes Singapore (no. 5), Sweden (no. 6), Israel (no. 7), Denmark (no. 8), the Netherlands (no. 9) and Norway (no. 10).

Meanwhile, the top categories for Android app downloads include games (25.6%), entertainment (12.2%), tools (11.7%), music (4.28%) and social (4.08%).

But the most interesting tidbits were associated with how Android owners use their apps. About 12 billion miles are navigated on Google Maps each year — which is equivalent to more than 37,000 trips to the moon — and 100 million words are translated every week in 200 different countries on Google Translate.

As for when most people download apps, searching through the Android Market the night before the work week starts is evidently a common activity. The most popular time to download an Android app is 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, while the least popular time to do so is just seven hours later at 4:00 a.m. Monday morning.

Other interesting Android app stats include the following:

About 1.87 million hours were spent on the popular movie database app IMDb in the past four months.

The equivalent of 5,054 years are spent playing with popular gaming app Talking Tom, during which Tom has been knocked down 10.6 billion times.

Users of the car racing app Asphalt would owe $3.2 billion in speeding ticket fines if they took their driving habits to the streets.

10 billion cans have been knocked down playing Can Knockdown. That’s a whole lot of cans.

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